Vlonqo

Vlonqo is a remote mountain town in the southern reaches of Ionia's Shon-Xan region. Though tucked into rugged highlands, it remains an active, inhabited settlement, home to a mortal population that gathers in large numbers for its public spectacles. It is best known in vastayan memory as the place where two of the Lhotlan tribe crossed paths and changed the course of their people's fight. The town sits beneath the Vlonqo cliffs, whose southern faces bear an enchanted flower found nowhere else. The petals of that flower are prized by ink-makers, who blend them with crushed Raikkon wild berries to produce rich, fine-lined pigments. The tattoo master Bo'lii, who works out of a tavern in the phantom port of Weh'le, counts these Vlonqo-sourced inks among the best available, using them to mark the bodies of the thieves and rogues who pass through his door. Vlonqo hosts a harvest festival that draws crowds from the surrounding country. It was at this festival that Rakan, the exiled battle-dancer who had wandered Ionia performing old vastayan songs, sang for the assembled town and entranced it with his gleaming plumage. In the same crowd stood Xayah, the freedom fighter called the Violet Raven, who had entered Vlonqo in search of a stolen artifact and was struck by the sight of the braying human audience. Xayah first dismissed Rakan as a preening buffoon and a human sympathizer, but his performance distracted the locals enough to make her mission far easier. When he pressed her for news of the Lhotlan and learned they had lost the last of their lands, his rage surprised her, and she revealed her rebellion to reclaim what the vastaya had lost. Rakan begged to join her. The encounter at Vlonqo bound the two Lhotlan together, and the town endures as the site of their first meeting.